U.S. Flights

Introduction

This report is about flights in the United States. We wanted to limit our scope in the United States rather than internationally to get a better sense of the flights around us. Knowing information about flights in the United States can benefit us if we travel. For example, we can find what airlines are usually delayed, so we could possibly avoid them in the future. The datasets we used are from OurAirports and 2015 Flight Delays and Cancellations, from Kaggle.

Summary

OurAirports contains information on all the airports around the United States. Out of seaports, heliports, balloonports, closed, large, medium, and small airpors, small airports are the most common and here are 34022 small airports, which are the most common types of airports around the country. 51157 of these airports do not schedule their services. 2015 Flight Delays and Cancellations, the other dataset, contains information on Alaska and Delta Airlines’ flight information in one year. Delta flew 875881 times this year, more than Alaska Airlines. This dataset shows that people travel the most frequently on the 4th day of the week, so Thursday. A total of 240232 flights were made on Thursday.

Table

This table includes the top 10 regions that have the most airports. This information is from OurAirports. It also includes the most common type of airports and average elevation of the airport of each region. Airport elevation is the highest point of an airport’s usable landing area measured in feet above mean sea level. The table shows that Texas has the most number of airports. California has the highest average airport elevation. Since Florida airports have lower average elevation, we may assume that Florida airports are vulnerable to sea level rise. Therefore, many passengers may be suffering from climate change.

Region	Number of airports	Most common type of airports	Average elevation in ft
US-TX	2280	small_airport	910.91894
US-CA	1088	small_airport	1043.40896
US-FL	968	small_airport	70.27644
US-PA	918	small_airport	892.81818
US-IL	903	small_airport	676.63526
US-AK	829	small_airport	447.08929
US-OH	800	small_airport	916.08750
US-IN	697	small_airport	759.15805
US-NY	668	small_airport	751.06977
US-WI	624	small_airport	964.16667

U.S. Map

Q: Where do most of the airports lie in the United States?

This map shows all of the small, medium, and large airports in the United States. This information is from OurAirports. This includes Alaska and Hawaii.

What this map tells us:

• Most of the airports lie on the East side of the United States.
• Airports on the West side are concentrated mostly in Washington, Oregon and California.
• In Alaska, there seems to be a cluster of airports on the South side.

Stacked Bar Chart

Q: Of the two most popular airlines, what was most popular during each part of the year?

This stacked bar chart compares two popular airlines. One is American Airlines (AA), and the other is Delta Airlines (DL). The data was found from 2015 Flight Delays and Cancellations on Kaggle. This chart compares the number of flights between the two airlines across the months in 2015.

What we can learn from this data:

• We expected December to have the most flights, but based off the graph, it was surprising to see that October had more overall flights than December. July and August were a part of summer, where people are on vacation, so we were not surprised by them having the most flights.
• The month with the most American Airline flights was July. The month with the most Delta Airlines flights was August, and the month with the most overall flights was July.
• The month with the least overall flights was February. Many people were probably busy during this month, which was why people did not travel as much.

Scatter Plot

Q: Is there a correlation between arrival delays and departure delays of flights?

The following scatter plot was composed from data on Kaggle, called 2015 Flight Delays and Cancellations. The scatter plot compares the arrival delays and departure delays of the flights of Delta Airlines and American Airlines. The scatter plot uses a random sample of 50 observations from both the flights of Delta Airlines and American Airlines. Negative values means the flight was early by arrival or departure, and positive values means the flight was late by arrival or departure. A value of 0 means that the flight was on time.

Some insights from the plot:

• Very high linear positive correlation between arrival delays and departure delays. This means that as an arrival delay increases, the departure delay increases as well.
• There is not a significant difference between the delays of Delta Airlines and American Airlines.
• Most flights seemed to arrive and depart on time or earlier.